Читать книгу The Victim - Jr. Thomas Dixon - Страница 19

Table of Contents

The mother's breakdown was not allowed to stop the Boy's education. Both father and older brother were determined on this. They would use the schools at home now.

He was sent to the County Academy in the fall. The Boy didn't like it. After the easy life with the kindly old monks at St. Thomas, this academy was not only cheap and coarse and uninteresting, but the teacher had no sense. He gave lessons so long and hard it was impossible to memorize them.

The Boy complained to the teacher. A lesson of the same length was promptly given again. The rebel showed the teacher he was wrong by failing to know it.

"I'll thrash you, sir!" was the stern answer.

The Boy would not take that from such a fool. He rose in his wrath, went home and poured out the indignant story of his wrongs.

The father was a man of few words, but the long silence which followed gave a feeling of vague uneasiness. He was never dictatorial to his children, but meant what he said. His voice was quiet and persuasive when he finally spoke.

"Of course, my son, you will have to choose for yourself whether you will work with your hands only, or with your head and hands. You can't be an idler, I need more cotton pickers. You don't like school, try the cotton, I'll give you work."

The Boy flushed and looked at his father keenly. It was no joke. He meant exactly what he had said, and a boy with any sand in his gizzard couldn't back down.

"All right, sir," was the firm answer. "I'll begin in the morning."

He went forth to his task with grim determination. The sun of early September had just risen and it was already hot as he bent to work. Cotton picking looked easy from a distance. When you got at it, things somehow were different. A task of everlasting monotony, this bending from boll to boll along the endless rows! He never realized before how long the cotton rows were. There was a little stop at the end before turning and selecting the next, but these rows seemed to stretch away into eternity.

Three hours at it, and he was mortally tired. His back ached in a dull hopeless pain. He lifted his head and gazed longingly toward the school he had scorned.

"What a fool!" he sighed. "But I'll stick to it. I can do what any nigger can."

He looked curiously at the slaves who worked without apparent effort. Not one of them seemed the least bit tired. He could get used to it, too. After all, this breath of the open world was better than being cooped up in a stuffy old schoolhouse with a fool to set impossible tasks.

"Pooh! I'll show my father!" he exclaimed.

The negroes broke into a plantation song. Jim Pemberton, the leader, sang each stanza in a clear fine tenor that rang over the field and echoed through the deep woods. The others joined in the chorus and after the last verse repeated in low sweet notes that died away so softly it was impossible to tell the moment the song had ceased.

The music was beautiful, but it was impossible for him to join in their singing. He couldn't lower himself to an equality with black slaves. This cotton picking seemed part of their scheme of life. Their strong black bodies swayed in a sort of rhythmic movement even when they were not singing. Somehow his body didn't fit into the scheme. His back ached and ached. No matter. He had chosen, and he would show them he had a man's spirit inside a boy's breast.

At noon the ache had worn away and he felt a sense of joy in conquering the pain.

He ate his dinner in silence and wondered what Polly was thinking about at school. Girl-like, she had cried and begged him to go back.

With a cheerful wave of his hand to his mother, he returned to the field before the negroes, strapped the bag on his shoulder and bent again to his task. The afternoon was long. It seemed at three o'clock there could be no end to it and still those long, long rows of white fleece stretched on and on into eternity—all alike in dull, tiresome monotony.

He whistled to keep up his courage.

The negroes whispered to one another and smiled as they looked his way. He paid no attention.

By four o'clock, the weariness had become a habit and at sundown he felt stronger than at dawn. He swung the bag over his back and started to the weighing place.

"Pooh—it's easy!" he said with scorn.

The negroes crowded around his pile of cotton.

"Dat Boy is sho one cotton-picker!" cried Jim Pemberton, regarding him with grinning admiration.

"Of course, I can pick cotton if I want to—"

"But ye raly don't wanter?" Jim grinned.

"Sure I do. I'm sick of school."

Jim laughed aloud and, coming close, whispered insinuatingly:

"I'se sho sick er pickin' cotton, an' when yer quits de job—"

"I'm not going to quit—"

"Yassah, yassah?—I understan' dat—but de pint is, when yer do quit, don't fergit Jim, Marse Jeff. I likes you. You got de spunk. I wants ter be yo' man."

The appeal touched the Boy's pride. He answered with quiet dignity:

"All right, James—"

Jim lifted his head and walled his eyes:

"Des listen at him call me Jeemes! I knows a real marster when I sees him!"

That night, the father asked no questions and made no comment on the fact that he had picked a hundred and ten pounds of cotton—as much as any man in the field. His deciding to work with his hands had apparently been accepted as final.

This thing of deciding life for himself was a serious business. It would be very silly to jump into a career with slaves, coarse and degrading, just because a fool happened to be teaching at the County Academy. He must think this thing over. Tired as he was, he lay awake until eleven o'clock, thinking, thinking for himself.

It was lonesome work, too, this thinking for himself.

If his father had only done the thinking for him, it would have been so much easier to accept his decision and then rebel if he didn't like it.

He returned to the field next morning with renewed determination. Through the long, hot, interminable day he bent and fought the battle in silence. His back ached worse than the first day. Every muscle in his finely strung little body was bruised and sore and on fire.

He began to ask if his father were right. Wasn't a man a double fool who had brains and refused to use them?

An idiot could pick cotton when the bag was fastened on his back. All he needed was one hand. All he had to do was to bend, hour after hour, day after day, until it became the habit of life and the ache stopped.

He could see this now, for himself. He smiled at the quiet wisdom of his father. He certainly knew how to manage boys. He must acknowledge that. He was quiet and considerate about it, too. He didn't dictate. He only suggested things for consideration and choice. It was easy to meet the views of that kind of a father. He treated a boy with the dignity of a man.

When the cotton was weighed, the Boy faced his father:

"I've thought it all over, sir, and I'd like to go back to school."

"All right, my son, you can return in the morning."

He made no comment. He indulged in no smile at the Boy's expense. He received his decision with the serious dignity of a judge of the Supreme Court of Life.

The rebellion ended for all time. Teachers and schools took on a new meaning. A lesson was no longer a hard task set by a heartless fool who had been accidentally placed in a position of power. School meant the training of his mind for a higher and more useful life.

Progress now was steady. The next year a new teacher came, a real teacher, the Rev. John Shaw from Boston, Massachusetts—a man of even temper, just, gentle, a profound scholar with a mind whose contagious enthusiasm drew the spirits of the young as a magnet.

The Boy learned more under his guidance within a year than in all his life before, and next full was ready to enter Transylvania University at Lexington, Kentucky.

The polite, handsome boy from Mississippi who had served an apprenticeship with his father's negroes in a cotton field, gave the professors no trouble. Good-natured, prudent, joyous, kind, manly, he attended to his lessons and his own business. He neither gambled nor drank, nor mingled with the rowdy set. He had come there for something else.

He had just passed his examinations for the Senior class in July, 1824, when the first great sorrow came. The wise father whom he had grown to love and reverence died in his sixty-eighth year.

His thoughtful Big Brother came in person to tell him and break the blow with new ambitions and new hopes. He had secured an appointment from President Monroe as a cadet to West Point from the State of Mississippi.

And then began the four years of stern discipline that makes a soldier and fits him to command men.

But once in those busy years did the gay spirit within rise in rebellion, to learn wisdom in the bitterness of experience.

With Emile Laserre, his jolly Creole friend from Louisiana, he slipped down to Bennie Haven's on a frolic—taking French leave, of course. The alarm was given of the approach of an instructor, and the two culprits bolted for the barracks at breakneck speed through pitch darkness. Scrambling madly through the woods, there was a sudden cry, a crash and silence. He had fallen sixty feet over a precipice to the banks of the Hudson. Young Laserre crawled carefully to the edge of the rock, peered over and called through the darkness:

"Are you dead, Jeff?"

He was suffering too much to laugh, though he determined to give an Irishman's reply to that question, if it killed him. He managed to wheeze back the answer:

"Not dead—but spachless!"

Many were the temptations of rebellion from the friends he loved in the years that followed, but never again did he yield. Somehow the thing didn't work in his case.

There was one professor who put his decision of obedience to the supreme test. For some reason this particular instructor took a violent dislike to the tall, dignified young Southerner. Perhaps because he was more anxious to have the love of his cadet friends than the approval of his teachers. Perhaps from some hidden spring of character within the teacher which antagonized the firm will and strong personality of the student who dared to do his own thinking. From whatever cause, it was plain to all that the professor sought opportunities to insult and browbeat the cadet he could not provoke into open rebellion.

The professor was lecturing the class on presence of mind as the supreme requisite of a successful soldier. He paused, and looked directly at his young enemy:

"Of course, there are some who will always be confused and wanting in an emergency—not from cowardice, but from the mediocre nature of their minds."

The insult was direct and intended. He hoped to provoke an outburst which would bring punishment, if not disgrace.

The cadet's lips merely tightened and the steel from the depths of his blue eyes flashed into his enemy's for a moment. He would bide his time.

Three days later, in a building crowded with students, the professor was teaching the class the process of making fire-balls.

The room was a storehouse of explosives and the ball suddenly burst into flames.

Cadet Davis saw it first and calmly turned to his tormentor:

"The fire-ball has ignited, sir—what shall I do?"

The professor dashed for the door:

"Run! Run for your lives!"

The cadet snatched the fire-ball from the floor, dashed it through the window and calmly walked out.

He had saved many lives and the building from destruction. His revenge was complete and sweet. But deeper and sweeter than his triumph over an enemy was the consciousness that he was master of himself. He had learned life's profoundest lesson.